Former President Donald Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt Tuesday morning that there are “a lot of bad genes” among migrants living in America.
During his presidential campaign, Trump, the Republican nominee, has repeatedly asserted that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, have allowed “millions of people from jails and from prisons” into the country.
In his appearance on Hewitt’s syndicated radio show, Trump repeated a recent campaign line that there are “13,000” convicted murderers that have entered this country illegally.
“When you look at the things [Harris] proposes, they’re so far off,” Trump told Hewitt. “She has no clue. How about allowing people to come through an open border? Thirteen thousand of which were murderers. Many of them murdered more than one person, and they’re now happily living in America right now.”
He continued, “Now, a murderer, I believe this; it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in this country right now.”
Newsweek reached out to the Trump and Harris campaigns via email for comment.
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Trump has frequently used the term “migrant crime” even though violent crime rates are decreasing in the United States. Studies indicate that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens.
Figures detailed in a September 25 letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement Deputy Director Patrick Lechleitner to Texas Representative Tony Gonzales show there are 13,099 immigrants convicted of homicide who are on the agency’s non-detained docket, meaning they are not in immigration detention.
However, the Department of Homeland Security says Trump and some Republican lawmakers are misinterpreting the data in the letter.
Most of the 13,099 individuals likely did not enter the U.S. in the past 3.5 years. The data spans the last 40 years. Many of these individuals are not in immigration detention because they are currently in law enforcement custody serving sentences.
Additionally, a 2022 Supreme Court ruling, not the Biden-Harris administration, determined that individuals cannot be held in immigration detention indefinitely. Consequently, people from countries that do not accept deportation flights must be released.
“The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners,” the DHS said in its statement.
Trump’s critics took aim at the former president’s ongoing rhetoric regarding migrants.
“Donald Trump has gone full eugenicist here,” constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis wrote on X, formerly Twitter, following Trump’s interview with Hewitt.
Eugenics is the discredited belief that selective breeding can improve the human species by breeding out undesirable traits and encouraging people with desirable traits to reproduce.
Trump has previously bragged about his genetics. During a January rally in Nevada, he told the crowd he shared genes with “smart people,” including his uncle, Professor John Trump, who he falsely claimed was the longest-serving professor in the history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“You know, I had an uncle. He’s the longest-serving professor, Doctor John Trump, in the history of MIT, with same genes—we have genes, we’re smart people, we’re smart people,” Trump said in January at a rally in Nevada.
“We’re like race—Mr. Lieutenant Governor—we’re like racehorses, too. You know, the fast ones produce the fast ones, and the slow ones doesn’t work out so well, right? But we’re no different in that sense.”
Trump’s talk of his genes could be due to his family’s alleged belief in eugenics, the president’s biographer, Michael D’Antonio, said in 2016.
“The [Trump] family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,” D’Antonio said in his PBS documentary, The Choice. “They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”
Immigration is one of the top issues concerning voters in this presidential election, rating second behind inflation or increasing costs.
Mass deportation was announced as a core part of the Republican Party’s immigration policy for 2024, promising it would be the largest deportation program in American history.
The party says it would target illegal or undocumented migrants living in the U.S., giving a figure of 11 million.
Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller promised a 100 percent deportation rate at the border by bringing back tough policies, including “remain in Mexico” and Title 42 restrictions used during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump has said that the National Guard and local law enforcement could be used to enact the policy.
